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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Here's more news you never hear about in the US press, even though it's an extremely important development. I think there are three reasons for this lack of coverage:

It is the express desire of neocons and warmongers to demonize people of the Middle East, especially followers of Islam. If successful, it is easier for gullible, uninformed Americans to not notice when BushCo slaughters hundreds of thousands of them. Who cares? They aren't people. They're oddities. Even if they are human, they wear dresses and go barefoot and are always running around shooting machine guns in the air and burning effigies and cars and shit like that. They're just animals.

The American press is pretty much a useless bunch of orange pancake made-up blow hards like Russert and Dobbs. Or, they're too busy chasing after Britney or Paris Hilton. Or they are sucking neocon ass. One of those three.

Anyhoo, it looks like there is a movement afoot, not with Arabs or Islamists in general, but with jihadists in particular. They not be likin' all the killin' been goin' on. And the higher-ups are sending very public messages to Osama bin Ladin to cool his fucking jets.

This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of Al Qaeda in an open letter to Zawahiri, absorbed and well-received, he says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli. In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on Al Qaeda to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit, trimmed beard, and easygoing demeanor making it hard to imagine that he was once on the front lines in Afghanistan.

Although Benotman's public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press.

...

Two months before Benotman's letter to Zawahiri was publicized in the Arab press, Al Qaeda received a blow from one of bin Laden's erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman Al Oudah, a Saudi religious scholar. Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, Al Oudah addressed Al Qaeda's leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: "My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed ... in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?"

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.~ Mark Twain